We're sorry

24/05/2010

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has written an open letter to members of the social networking mega-site, apologising for the rather large-scale balls up that they made with the privacy settings, angering swathes of their 450,000,000 users and prompting concerns that the company were using member’s private information to give to other companies, so they could pummel you with advertising.

Zuckerberg denies this was ever the idea, and said in the letter, which appears in the Washington Post, that the plan was never to make it harder for the users to protect their privacy.

‘We do not give advertisers access to your personal information,’ he wrote. ‘Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

‘We have heard the feedback. There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services. We are working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible. We hope you'll be pleased with the result of our work and, as always, we'll be eager to get your feedback.

‘We have also heard that some people don't understand how their personal information is used and worry that it is shared in ways they don't want. I'd like to clear that up now. Many people choose to make some of their information visible to everyone so people they know can find them on Facebook. We already offer controls to limit the visibility of that information and we intend to make them even stronger.’